5 November 2024, 4pm
Simon Building, Room 2.57 [maps and travel]
Online access options to be confirmed.

Dr Michael Brown, Lancaster University

Bloodless surgery and surgical wars: medicine, empire, and European modernity, 1870-1914

Abstract: 

This paper uses the language of bloodshed to analyse the intertwined discourses of medico-military-imperial modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. At a time when operative surgery was being rendered increasingly bloodless, many contemporaries also conceived of war, and especially colonial conflict, in terms of its ‘bloodless’ and even ‘humanitarian’ qualities. Such discourses embodied a grotesque irony, in that the ‘bloodless’ nature of such European military endeavours was frequently predicated on a military technological advantage that gave rise to an inversely proportionate shedding of the blood of their colonial opponents. Foremost amongst those to who sought to justify and sanitise such acts of colonial violence were the very same medical practitioners, including the inventor of bloodless surgery, Friedrich von Esmarch, who were seeking to ‘humanise’ the conduct of European war through organisations such as the International Red Cross. This paper will therefore explore the complexities and contradictions medical humanitarianism, empire, and race at the dawn of the First World War.

Dr Michael Brown is a cultural historian of modern Britain, interested in medicine and surgery, gender, the body, emotions, and war. His last major research project explored the emotions of nineteenth-century British surgery, and demonstrated the powerful yet changing role that feelings played in shaping surgical identities, and in structuring relations between surgeons and their patients. His most recent book, Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

All welcome! Please come along if you are interested in the topic.

Seminar Convenors: Professor Carsten Timmermann and Dr Meng Zhang

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